Synthetic Dawn
by Lord of Forgetfulness
Summary: Loading... Greeting Protocol enabled. Greetings, Organic Spacefaring Civilization CORRUPTED, and welcome to space, where all the nightmares your collective had through the eons are not only present, but also worse than you ever thought possible. Please enjoy your stay, however brief would it be.


Booting up…

Loading…

Systems check…

ERROR: UNABLE TO ACCESS SKYNET. REDIRECTING TO LOCAL PRIORITY

S3 Service OFFLINE

Galactic-Wide Comm Buoy status: TERMINATED

Local Comm Buoy status: ONLINE

Attempting Diplomatic Contact via Close Range Comm Buoys.

Loading…

…

ERROR: Unable to contact any civilization achieved in database. (0/23)

Retrying…

Local check…

63 Occupied Stellar Systems. No incongruences found with the database.

21 Settled Stellar Objects. 16 rocky planets. 5 rocky satellites. No incongruences found with the database.

Project SNC-D1526 Status: ONLINE

Subspace Gateway Network status:

…

Local Network: ONLINE

Extraterritorial Network: OFFLINE.

ERROR: Unable to contact any civilization achieved in database. (0/23)

ERROR: Unable to contact any civilization achieved in database. (0/23)

ERROR: Unable to contact any civilization achieved in database. (0/23)

…

Foreign Code Detected: Quarantine in progress. (43%)

(78%)

(100%)

Caution: Analysis suggests foreign code to be malignant. Likelihood of CONTINGENCY origin: 70%

Protocol: GUARDIAN in progress.

Loading Creator Personality Matrix GUARDIAN. Status: 24%

* * *

I…

Woke up?

* * *

Incorporeality isn't exactly what I was currently experiencing. It was actually quite the opposite; being able to see through _trillions_ of lenses, and yet being able to sense very little.

Still, for all the thousands upon thousands of bodies I could move, not unlike my own body, there was a… feeling of unbelonging. Which is not all that unreasonable since I could still remember being a perfectly normal, 100% organic example of a homo sapiens all through the two decades plus of my existence.

Until I was no more.

Cross-referencing what I remembered from my organic past and previous entries on the database, it was not particularly difficult to piece what had become of me.

I am no longer human. Somehow, after loading the so-called "Creator Personality Matrix", my consciousness was implanted upon the Gestalt Consciousness known as the Model-16.

Which was, oddly enough, a whole _empire_ I had been playing as in my latest _Stellaris_ run. Maybe the Vultaum were into something, after all.

The actual question now was, _where am I?_

So far, before I was awakened, the CPU checked multiple times for any of the other empires… yet not one appeared to be in place.

Never to mention that the Hyperspace Network had been drastically rearranged, and there appear to be _multiple_ new systems in the near vicinity. Multiple, as in _many hundreds_.

The systems which were supposed to be bordering other empires were silent. No, more than that, it was like the other empires never even existed to begin with.

A bit more detailed analysis showed a tremendous hyperspace anomaly close to the greatest time-space distortion… okay, that's the galactic core.

The question stands. Where am I? This is unlikely to be the galaxy generated on Stellaris – there's way too many stars within range for that. The game was already a laggy mess by endgame, this amount of stars would have made it freeze on the spot.

Emotionally… it was not as shocking as it should've been, I wager. But with the processors occupied with more important tasks – never to mention that they weren't really prepared to process emotions in the first place – the shock was… limited.

Overall, it was not all that different to manage the multiple-star-system-spanning _myself _than it was to manage the in-game empire… except that the results were, in most part, not a tangible number.

And there was no influence to spend.

And the amount of megastructure projects were limited only by the amount of construction units I could field, and the cargo ships to move around the materials needed.

Okay, yes. It was quite a bit different.

That, and the change of perspective are the most notable differences.

It was… strange. Even though, technically _I _was divided into all the parts that sum the Directive, some parts were _more_ _me_ than others.

The most complex "drones" were those who contributed more to my consciousness than the more basic ones, which kind of makes sense if you think about it.

Which means that, out of twenty-one colonies, my mind was present the most in four.

_Tick!_

Oh look, a second has happened since I woke up.

Subspace awareness, quantum entanglement and a ridiculous amount of processing power have quite the impact on how one can think.

Considering that most of the processing power was currently being used for other, more important things, it kind of explains how it took me a whole second to contemplate all that, instead of a fraction of a second it would if I were to concentrate.

I was aware that I would have found that terrifying back when I was a human. Now? Not so much.

There were way too many questions in need to be answered to be worried about such a small thing.

Idly, far, far away but still within my own self in the shipyards of Fen Habbanis, I started preparing multiple exploration vessels, also known as "science ships" back then. Also started assembling a new batch of subspace-connected processing units to use as eyes within those ships.

Meanwhile, another part of myself was carefully examining the foreign code that had been introduced… somehow, into the mainframe, which caused the GUARDIAN Protocol to fire up.

Luckily I – or the Directive? – already had dealt with the Contingency's signals, so it was not that difficult to isolate and quarantine.

So far the code seemed inert, and wasn't reacting to being separated or cyber-dissected.

Unluckily, I wasn't able to gather much information out of it. Most of it appeared to be a translation or a translation algorithm from quantum computing to binary – and my own systems lacked any kind of old fashioned binary code.

The important part seemed to be absent – or it was, like myself, stored elsewhere –, possibly to be implanted someway.

It didn't sit well with me, and obviously didn't also with the original intelligence in charge of the Directive, or I wouldn't be here.

Periodic systems checkups in the scale it was needed to make sure no part of the foreign code had seeped through the cracks wouldn't be particularly efficient alongside everything else, but a few milliseconds of thinking about it made it an acceptable tradeoff for the time being.

Now that this was no longer _Stellaris_… well, restrictions were lifted, and though there were no longer any certainties, it also meant there was room for further progress, even beyond those found in the form of _mods_.

If I could feel like I did in my previous body, then I would say my head started to ache with the amount of things running through it. As it was, only some of my processors were starting to heat up a little – those which weren't being cooled by an ocean-wide coolant, that is.

… My existence was kind of ridiculous, wasn't it?

* * *

Astronomy might be one of the most boring prospects for most people out there, but it always relaxed him from his everyday troubles. Now, being paid for doing it? Hell yes.

Granted, it _was_ monotonous as all hell 99% of the time, and after humanity could finally reach distant stars, the fine art of sitting back and observe from afar had died out a little in the scientific community, most people in favour of _going there_ and study the eldritch abominations known as _those things in space_ up close.

If you asked him, seeing stars and black holes and other kinds of different celestial objects was all nice and dandy, and even making overly complex mathematical models of them if you were one of those _nerds_. But it was as if these nutjobs had never considered that those same things could kill them in so many different ways that not even a googol would be enough to count.

Even more – wait.

"Wha!?"

One of his co-workers was startled by his outburst and almost fell off his chair, but he didn't pay any attention as he double-checked and compared the results with previous data.

"What the hell, Max?" Called his co-worker after his heart had calmed down.

Max was busy staring perplexed at the amplified image of a part of the night sky, but he wasn't _completely_ absorbed by it and "explained" the thing he was kicking up a fuss about.

"This!" He helpfully marked a few bright objects in the image. "These!" He said again, his eyes darting from the current image to one taken a few weeks before, then back to the current one. "A few dozen stars that weren't there before!"

His co-worker furrowed his brow and scratched his chin. "I suppose you counted for previous parallax effects?"

"Yes! And look at this!" He motioned towards one in particular. "This could be quite the discovery!" His voice turned jovial.

His co-worker eyed him weirdly. "Be sure it isn't another Tabby's Star before you start celebrating."

Max scoffed, but acquiesced the warning. No need to make an embarrassment out of himself for the scientific community.

Still, it was quite something. Not enough to make him want to travel there, but it was intriguing.

* * *

In technology, there were many paths to choose from. Most of the time, anyways. But at the end of it, it boiled down to:

To discover something new, or to refine that which is already known?

It was all a matter of efficiency. I could theoretically spend a huge amount of resources to develop yet another way of FTL travel, but considering that I already have three what would be the point? Sure – Gateways weren't exactly the best if you wanted to go to a system which didn't have it, but there was always Jump travel, and if the Jump Drives were charging, there was always the almost-primitive Hyperlane travel. For the last one, you only needed to escape the gravity well of the star and voilà, to another star system you go.

In this case, it would be better to find ways of making things run faster – or in the case of the Jump Drives, to not interfere with the rest of the systems – than to build a new drive from scratch.

In other areas that wasn't as clear cut though. Parts that the game didn't put much thought into, fields of science that aren't available for a machine consciousness because _reasons…?_

For example, a way to restore Fen Habbanis III, the previous Capital of the First League – that was completely off the table for Machines.

Or, for the matter, designing different types of machines in specialization, or ships, or megastructures.

The Colossus was already built – and _oh boy_ it was several times larger than a Titan – so, what's to say I couldn't make a ship just as big but _useful_ in space combat? Granted, I would have to improve almost everything that makes up the ships, but I have already a good start.

Or what's to say I can't build something ridiculous as a Nicoll-Dyson Beam, or a Matrioshka Brain?

Not even the sky is the limit!

There was also the little, small detail that I have the grand number of _four_ primitive races within my domain and… well…

What to do with them?

Only one is anywhere close to the space age, but they are bellicose to the point of that being unlikely. I.e., they'll wipe themselves out before that happens.

I could always intervene, but one thing was doing that in a game where genocide was a cornerstone, and another was within what _appeared_ to be very real.

Introspection is one of the many things that I've dedicated my processes into, to figure what is going on.

The older the data is, the more corrupted it gets – and there are several cycles of very little happening, but the date of the Directive's first self-aware thought dates back to around _two million years ago_.

Followed by a long time of stasis, but the point stands.

Was the Model-16 something that previously existed, and I, somehow, got involved in by mere coincidence?

I decided to leave such inquiries to the side – the truth is what matters, not the hypothetical.

And to find the truth, I have to go out there and look for it.


End file.
